Ali Alkhatib is the Director of the Center for Applied Data Ethics. He is a social computing researcher trained in Computer Science and Anthropology. His research explores how people relate to artificial intelligence and technology broadly, and attempts to situate those relationships in historical backdrops and ontological foundations using scholarship from the social sciences. Ali studied Computer Science at Stanford and earned a BA in Anthropology & B.S. in Informatics from UC Irvine.
Past Affiliates
Rachel Thomas was the founding director of the USF Center for Applied Data Ethics and co-founder of fast.ai, where she helped create the most popular free online course on deep learning, bringing people from around the world with diverse and nontraditional backgrounds into AI. Rachel earned her PhD in mathematics at Duke University and previously worked as a data scientist and software engineer. She was selected by Forbes as one of 20 Incredible Women in AI and was profiled in the book Women Tech Founders on the Rise. She wrote chapters for the books 97 Things About Ethics Everyone in Data Science Should Know and Deep Learning for Coders with fastai and PyTorch.
Rumman Chowdhury, Ethical Entrepreneurship Fellow Dr. Rumman Chowdhury’s passion lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and humanity. She holds degrees in quantitative social science and has been a practicing data scientist and AI developer since 2013. Dr. Chowdhury is a pioneer in the applied ethical AI field – she is currently founder and CEO of Parity, a startup dedicated to identifying and mitigating the risk and harm introduced by AI systems. Prior to founding Parity, she led Accenture’s global Responsible AI practice, and developed the Fairness Tool, the first enterprise tool for bias identification and mitigation. She has been named by Forbes as one of the “Five who are shaping AI”, and by BBC as one of their 100 Women for 2017. She serves on the board for AI4All, a group dedicated to drawing underrepresented groups into STEM, and Patterns, a data science journal by the publishers of Cell.
Razvan Amironesei, Data Ethics Research Fellow was most recently a visiting scholar in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, where he chaired a multicampus faculty research group on algorithms and politics. His PhD dissertation in philosophy was devoted to the relationship between biopower and the concept of life, where he engaged with a sociological and theoretical analysis of Human-computer interaction technologies, in particular the question of brain surveillance.
Nana Young, Data Ethics Research Fellow is a global health bioethicist. Her research interests include ethical implications of disruptive technology, algorithmic justice, and harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to drive ethical, sustainable development in low and middle-income countries. Nana has an MA in Bioethics & Science Policy from Duke University and a BA in sociology from Princeton.